Force a statement to visually write to a file slowly - php

Question

I have a want to take a File.open('somefile', 'w+') and make it read a file, take one line of text at a time, and visually write it slowly in another file. The reason I ask this question is because I can find nothing that does this already in code, nor can I find anything that actually controls the speed of how fast a program writes on the computer. I know that this can be simulated in a program such as Adobe Aftereffects so long as you provide a cursor after a character and the visual effect doesn't take place too quickly, but I've got 4,000 lines of code that I want to iterate over and can't afford to do this manually. This effect can also be achieved with a Microsoft Macro, but this requires it to be manually entered into the macro with no option of copy and paste.
-solutions preferred in Python, Ruby, and PHP-

Answer 1

If I understood properly, what you are trying to achieve, here you go:
input = File.read('readfrom.txt', 'r')
File.open('writeto.txt', 'w+') do |f|
input.chars.each do |c|
f.print(c) # print 1 char
f.flush # flush the stream
sleep 1 # sleep
end
end

Answer 2

This is one quick and dirty way of doing it in Python.
from time import sleep
mystring= 'My short text with a newline here\nand then ensuing text'
dt = 0.2 #0.2 seconds
for ch in mystring:
with open('fn_out','w+') as f:
f.write(ch)
f.flush()
sleep(dt)
f.flush() will result in updating the file with the changes.
One could make this more elaborate by having a longer pause after each newline, or a variable timestep dt.
To watch the change one has to repeatedly reload the file, as pointed out by #Tom Lord so you could run something like this beforehand to watch it in the terminal:
watch -n 0.1 cat fn_out

Answer 3

After some serious testing, I have finally developed a piece of code that will do the very thing I want. Tom Lord gave me some new words to use in my search terms "simulate typing" and this led me to win32ole with its SendKeys function. Here is a code that will iterate over all the characters in a file and print them out exactly as they were saved while simulating typing. I will see about making this into a gem for future use.
require 'win32ole'
wsh = WIN32OLE.new("WScript.Shell")
wsh.Run("Notepad.exe")
while not wsh.AppActivate("Notepad")
sleep 1
end
def fileToArray(file)
x = []
File.foreach("#{file}") do |line|
x << line.split('')
end
return x.flatten!
end
tests = fileToArray("readfrom.txt")
x = 0
while x <= tests.length
send = tests[x]
wsh.SendKeys("#{send}")
x += 1
sleep 0.1
end